the Best Little Newspaper in Town

Main menu

Post navigation

No Long Term Winning With Nature & Gravity

In 1983 John Mellencamp charted ‘Authority Song’ that had the hook chorus “I fought authority, authority always wins.”
Earlier in 1965 you Baby Boomers will remember The Bobby Fuller Four recording a similar themed ‘I fought the law and the law won.”
It was a cover of the same song from 1960 by the Crickets. These are the same Crickets but without bass player Waylon Jennings who gave up his seat in 1959 on the plane that crashed killing Cricket lead singer Buddy Holly, Ritchie Valens, and J.P. Richardson known as the Big Bopper—the Day the Music Died.
But this is not a column on musicology. It is a call for a remake of a similar themed song for 2019: “I battled Mother Nature and she kicked my butt.”
Depending on where you are in Jackson and Scott County, we found that Mother Nature always wins. You can stave her off for a little while with mowing, trimming, grading but when she sends over 8 inches of rain… well, she wins.
The flatland livers know well about flooding fields and roads. That’s not something those of us who live in the hills deal with. Here it is flash flooding. Torrents of rushing water, coming down out of the hills aided by gravity, trying to get through culverts under roadways and lanes. State Road 135 had rushing water across it preventing passage in several areas.
Then when the water went down, bridges were closed for repair. INDOT got them back open is pretty quick fashion. In the meanwhile, I detoured north nearly to Brown County, turning uphill into Houston (it’s not Hew-ston, it’s Hows-ton, for you non-locals) then back south to Brownstown. And on the way along the White River basin I saw farm fields—hurriedly planted after a wet spring and cool grand temperatures prevented much farm work—now under a lot of water.
Ironically the best corn I have seen growing in on the hillsides near Houston near the area known as Bald Knobs. It will be ‘knee high by the 4th of July’…if the deer don’t eat it first.
At the wilderness, Mother Nature and gravity had their way with us.
The lake was exiting out the emergency overflows as it was fed with water from a quarter-mile long hollow. It is now back down to normal lake level.
There are 10” deep ruts in the half-mile lane. The rain breeched the gravel water diverters I put in the lane to prevent such rain ruts. The rock that was once the lane is now scattered where gravity wanted it to go in the woods and pasture.
It will all get fixed eventually. But Mother Nature has told us that she will be back sometime for Round 2.